Thursday, February 4, 2010

Scientists (Do Not) Find a Fingerprint of Evolution

Did you know that most of the evidence claimed for evolution is actually not evidence for evolution? That's right, remember the mountain of evidence that evolutionists say is supposed to make evolution a fact? Well most of it consists of biological findings that merely have been interpreted according to evolution.

Here is an example that I've discussed before at Evolution News & Views. A prestigious scientific journal, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, published detailed findings about how DNA information is used to make proteins in our cells. The research team, led by Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory professor Michael Zhang, discovered subtle signals in the DNA that help guide incredibly complex molecular machinery when editing the DNA information. The findings are not in any way evidence for evolution, and yet the headlines proclaimed “Scientists Find a Fingerprint of Evolution Across the Human Genome.”

This was not merely a case of journalistic naivete. One can hardly blame the science writer when the journal paper itself presented the results as elucidating the evolutionary process. The paper's title alone (“RNA landscape of evolution for optimal exon and intron discrimination”) suggests a new finding about evolution, and the paper concludes that human genes seem to have been optimized “during evolution.”

But the “during evolution” part is gratuitous. The key findings are about how the genetic signals work, not that they evolved. There is, in fact, nothing in the findings to indicate evolution. The science writer concluded that “the researchers found signs that evolution rejects some types of mutations,” but there simply was no such finding. What the researchers actually found was the presence of certain subtle signals in the genome. They found no evidence that the signals were produced by evolution.

This dynamic is common and, not surprisingly, influences popular thinking. For reports such as this are taken to be objective, scientific confirmations of evolution. They often find their way into the popular literature, text books, Internet discussions, origins debates and so forth. Because evolution is believed to be a fact, we have lost the ability to rightly evaluate scientific evidence. All evidence must point to evolution, even if it doesn’t. This is yet another way that evolution harms science.

So maybe it is a mandatory excercise for authors to get their researches accepted and published as approved, something like "imprimatur" by darwinian establishment.

Being from a former communist country I remember that during culmination of fanaticism there must have been remark about Marx and struggle of working class (sounds pretty like struggle for life, doesn't it?) even in English dictionary or Electrotechnics textbooks.

Scientific theories are simply explanations of observed facts. So, for example, we see an apple fall out of a tree to the ground. What can account for such a thing? Let's create a hypothesis which states that every object with mass has a force of attraction we'll call G. The apple was then pulled to the ground because the power of the planet's G is far stronger than that of anything else on it (by virtue of being far bigger than anything else on it).

So then what? Well, we perform experiments to see if this hypothesis holds. We make predictions and see if the world behaves as if our hypothesis was true.

But in doing so, we are interpreting the data according to our hypothesis (which becomes a theory once it has passed a certain standard of evidence). There is nothing unscientific about this.

Each example of, say, objects falling down, is not proof of the theory of G in and of itself. But they are examples of real observations we would expect to find if our theory was correct. This is what we mean by evidence supporting our theory.

So, turning this back to evolution, when we talk about evidence for evolution, what we are referring to are observations which the theory of evolution accounts for.

For example, the fact that all mammals have exactly the same arrangement of bones in their forearms.

This is a factual observation. It is also accounted for by the theory of evolution. So, it is evidence for evolution.

It is not a valid criticism to say of such evidence that "most of it consists of biological findings that merely have been interpreted according to evolution."

Yes. If you interpret it according to evolution it makes sense! The theory of evolution ACCOUNTS for the evidence.

The theory of evolution has turned science into a horrible means of trying to ONLY justify it. The fact is science spends its time trying to prove and support evolution while rejecting and disregarding other information and evidence for other results. It's sad...seriously.